Time-lapse map shows Ellis Act impacts

Tenant advocates who have been calling Ellis Act evictions an epidemic in the past month released a time-lapse map Tuesday to illustrate how they believe landlords lawfully leaving the rental business have changed The City’s housing landscape over the past decade and a half.

The Ellis Act eviction map available at www.antievictionmappingproject.net — the first of a series of animated displacement maps by the several-months-old Anti-Eviction Mapping Project — exposes 3,705 housing units evicted via the state law from 1997 through August of this year.

Often, an Ellis Act eviction is filed as a single petition for the entire building though it can affect more than one household, said Erin McElroy, a lead organizer for the project fueled by the San Francisco Tenants Union and volunteers.

To put the displacement numbers in perspective, the map features chronological “explosions,” where the sizes of the explosions correspond to the number of families forced out by each Ellis Act notice. Locations where multiple families were displaced form larger dots.

“People don’t talk about the number of families an Ellis Act eviction actually displaces — it’s just counted as one Ellis Act,” McElroy said. “We wanted to show with this map that it’s actually more than it seems.”